Written by Katie Chiou

IN CONVERSATION WITH is a series from Archetype where we interview artists in/at the edges of crypto across music, visual art, design, curation, and more.

Chuck Anderson is a Chicago-based artist, graphic designer, photographer, and creative director. Chuck’s career has spanned over 20 years, beginning with the founding of his creative studio NoPattern at the age of 18. Over the years Chuck has collaborated with brands such as Nike, Apple, ESPN, the Chicago Bulls, The New York Times, and more. In 2005, Chuck co-founded influential early internet culture blog THE BRILLIANCE! with Benjamin Edgar and Virgil Abloh and continues to champion creativity through his speaking engagements and mentorship of students and young creatives.

In 2022, Chuck launched his first long-form NFT collection entitled Infinite Pressure which included 90 solo works and 9 collaborations with 9 different artists including Gremplin, Case Simmons, Maalavidaa, Oseanworld, Ezra Miller, Jen Stark, Christian Rex van Minnen, Joshua Davis, and IX Shells. This was followed in 2023 by a collaborative collection with GQ, and a new body of work entitled Imagined Wreckage released in partnership with Verse in 2024.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Katie Chiou: For those who may not be familiar with your work, can you share more about your background/journey as a designer and artist? 

Chuck Anderson: I will be 40 this year, which is still insane to think about because I started my practice, NoPattern, in 2003 when I was 18. I didn’t go to college. I pretty much graduated high school and decided to take some time off to figure things out. I worked at a bookstore and a screenprinting shop, I honestly didn’t really have much of a plan.

Since I was young, I’ve always been really captivated by the internet. The power of being able to communicate with virtually anyone in the world fascinated me. And it was during that year after high school that I started getting small freelance projects just by being active in a handful of online design communities. I began reaching out to people via email, and I was getting some good responses. Pre-social media, there was very little competition to get in touch with people. If you managed to do it, you stood out because you weren’t dealing with DMs, LinkedIn, or whatever. Magazines were my sweet spot early on. I realized that if I could find an art director’s name in the masthead, I could probably guess their email address and figure it out. That’s pretty much how it all began.

Over the years, I started working with larger companies, brands, and agencies. I’ve always struggled to define what to call myself. I don’t really feel like a graphic designer, but I’m not purely an artist either. Digital artist is probably the most accurate title I could give myself. But I had a really specific lane and vision for my work, and I found a lot of cool brands to partner with, which led to great projects. Fast-forward to today: I still do all of my other work, but I’ve just started a new role as the Creative Director at Ernie Ball, a guitar company I’ve been working with for a long time. Everything else is pretty much filling in the blanks between those bookends.

KC: Your first medium was photography. In past interviews, you’ve referenced spending a lot of your time in high school just experimenting in Photoshop. Would you say your foundation started there? Were you taught by your teachers or parents or anyone like that?

CA: No one person gave me my comfort with a computer, that was all me. I’m a very curious person. I’m never satisfied with the top layer of anything. That’s how I was with Photoshop when I first discovered it. As far as teachers in high school and my parents go, I had great support. I was really lucky that my high school art teachers were so open-minded. They basically let me sit in the computer lab and I would design things, show them what I was working on, and they’d give me feedback on composition. I felt really encouraged. I don’t know if that necessarily set me up for a career, but so much of this was incidental. I didn’t suddenly feel like, “Okay, here it is—time to be a founder and start my design studio.” I was just an 18 or 19 year-old getting some projects for bands, doing flyers for clubs, and working with magazines. 

Back in the early 2000s, the only way to learn Photoshop was to get instructional books or magazines and obsess over them. And that’s exactly what I did. I eventually got a job working at Borders Bookstore. That was a total unlock for me because employees could check books out like a library. Suddenly, I could bring home books I couldn’t afford, and it felt like I had a wealth of information in front of me. I loved it. Digital photography was just emerging as a new concept, and I started taking photos, bringing them into Photoshop, and using that as the foundation to build and learn. That’s where it all started.

KC: I’d love to talk about THE BRILLIANCE!. What was it like running a blog during the early internet? How did you get the word out there, connect with readers, etc.?

CA: THE BRILLIANCE! was a very seminal point in my life and career. It was a hugely influential project, not only for me but for the people who were there at the time. Not a lot of things last on the internet for 20 years like that.

Basically, the beginning of it was just me and Benjamin Edgar. He and I were childhood friends. We would email back and forth constantly, sharing links, inspiration, and images from the internet that we would find. You have to situate this in the time—2003, 2004—when things were harder to find. It was like going to a record store and flipping through records to discover something, versus now, where everything is manicured, curated, and served up. 

One day, I suggested we start a blog, which was THE BRILLIANCE!. Those first few posts were a mix of editorial and personal—posts about things that interested us: travel, food, art, music, the internet, cars, watches—whatever we were into at the time. We had no plans to make money or run ads. We barely made any money on it, aside from a handful of collaborations. I wish we had figured that out, but it stayed pretty pure.

This was also right when Hypebeast launched. Highsnobiety wasn’t even a thing yet. There were just a handful of blogs back then. That early aesthetic, that simplicity, was part of why THE BRILLIANCE! looks the way it does—kind of like Drudge Report, unchanging, very text-heavy. 

One day, out of the blue, we got an email from a guy named Virgil Abloh. He was just a student at the time, a kid from Chicago, like us, from the suburbs. He reached out, saying he’d love to write for us one day if we were interested. After a few back-and-forth emails, we invited him to be the third writer. And the rest is history.

KC: And how were you engaging with readers or building community? Were there big email chains or forums? 

CA: I don’t remember exactly how we got the word out, but between message boards and doing interviews with interesting people, it started to grow. It was as close as you could get to a zine on the internet at that time. We realized the network effect—interviewing cool people who would then share it with their friends. If we talked about a certain blog, a certain shoe, a certain album, it would inevitably get back to those people because we linked to them. They’d see it. It’s crazy how manual it was, but people would notice traffic coming from our site and reach out. 

You really have to remove the knowledge of what social media was going to be before the internet was so ingrained in daily life. This was the sweet spot of the internet. It was online and accessible anytime, but you weren’t getting push notifications, a constant onslaught of information. You weren’t finding out about it from a post in your feed. You were finding out because you intentionally typed in a web address to see what we were up to.

Eventually, we did set up an RSS feed, but you also have to remember this was a side project for all of us. We weren’t looking for subscribers or anything. This was for the love of the game. I think that’s why it was so respected. The fact that I was able to get an interview with Futura in 2005 or 2006—some kid in the middle of the Midwest emailing a random address on his website at the time—and he got back and said he’d do an interview with us? That was huge. But it was because we were so hell-bent on trying to connect with people, trying to amplify our interests on the site. There was no deeper motivation beyond community, sharing, discovery, and meeting people.

KC: You had THE BRILLIANCE! in 2005, but now there’s Perfectly Imperfect, Blackbird Spyplane, How Long Gone, Throwing Fits, whatever. What do you think about how taste and recommendation culture has evolved today?

CA: It’s not surprising. Ben and I were just the perfect age to catch the beginning of the internet wave and start moving with it. At the end of the day, some people will always want to go do their own boots-on-the-ground research and find things themselves, but most people want to go to one spot where things are curated and served to them. It’s just easier. That’s also how people have gotten used to the internet—everyone’s experience is now segmented, tailored to what they want and what they’re looking for.

I also think we went too far in one direction—creative culture on the internet became too open, with this whole “Everyone’s a curator” mentality. And now, it’s whiplashed back to, “Actually, gatekeeping is good.” Curation is necessary. Without those things, we’re just wandering through an endless mall of content all the time. I don’t mean gatekeeping in the sense of barricading information, but more in terms of maintaining a point of view and paying people for their work. We’ve gotten so used to expecting everything online to be free. In another universe, maybe there could have been something like that for THE BRILLIANCE!, some kind of subscriber tier or something. 

The internet has gotten so big, so broad, that it became necessary to have more curated spaces. Everyone knows about everything now. Nothing feels shocking, novel, or new anymore. That’s why I think it’s still important to have places where people can put things in front of an audience in a thoughtful way.

KC: You have a very special relationship with print. As a primarily digital artist, how do you think about that relationship? When you’re working on a piece are you specifically conceptualizing whether it will be in print or not?

CA: I attribute my love of print to probably just my age and where I grew up. Discovering work back then was all about magazines—they were the thing for me. I can basically chalk everything up to that because I would take trips downtown from the suburbs, knowing exactly which stores or comic book stores carried the best magazines. I had stacks of them. There was so much discovery, so much cool work. 

Print gave me my first paychecks. At the time, there was no viable online space to make money from design. I was getting paid for work that ended up in print ads, billboards, magazines, record covers—all physical media. So even though I was working on a computer, the output was always in print. That was what drew me in.

Now, since my work relies so much on color, I still think about print technically. If something is going to print, I almost always work in an RGB space but with Proof Colors turned on so I can see how it’ll translate to CMYK. I know that’s getting into the technical weeds, but it’s just how I taught myself early on to preserve my colors. There’s just nothing better than holding something you designed in your hands after seeing it on a screen. I always keep going back for that feeling—anytime I can do work for publications or print, I take it.

Honestly, I think it’s a disservice to let work live only on the internet. Even if an artist just prints a little zine for themselves, art is best experienced on a physical surface, to me. That’s not some elder millennial, boomer take—I really believe there’s something about experiencing work outside of a screen. Even digitally made art takes on a different presence when you print it out and sit with it without a screen between your eyes.

KC: You launched your first NFT collection Infinite Pressure in 2022. What made you interested in NFTs and want to launch a collection?

CA: I had been making the Infinite Pressure-like work many, many months before and just posting it on Twitter. One day, I posted something and said I'd love to figure out a way to adapt this work for an Art Blocks release. Because I thought, while not generative, it's still vector-based, so there might be a way to partner with somebody to do that. I knew I needed someone on the tech side, and then CHAIN/SAW reached out and was like, "Hey, let’s figure this out. Let’s do something. I’d love to work with you and put this together." So I was stoked to have a partner there. 

My whole mantra, and Ben’s as well, is based on a very simple saying: "If you do something, something will happen." That’s the crux of my whole life. Because the opposite is, "If you do nothing, nothing will happen."

In hindsight, I can’t believe it. It was 99 works—all started at auction at 0.99 ETH. We sold the whole collection out in 4 days.

KC: What made you interested in NFTs? Did it feel like it added something substantively to your work or more so just a cool new thing to try out?

CA: I definitely felt like I was so perfectly set up to be someone who would do this. There was nothing I had to change about myself, but suddenly there was a viable way to sell work without having to go to UPS. I’ve had an online shop and been mailing my work in different formats to people—whether it be a print, a book, original artwork, or a shirt—for 20 years. As soon as there were NFTs, it was a pretty simple answer for me. If somebody wants to pay me money for work I’m doing and I don’t have to ship it to them, why would I not do this?

I minted my first NFT on Zora. I was one of the first few hundred  or so people on Foundation. I was very lucky to get those early introductions from people who’d followed my work in the years prior to the NFT boom. I always felt very fortunate to have had a career foundation before NFTs because I’ve seen so many new artists come to prominence in NFTs, have a quick flash, and then kind of never be heard from again. Whether it’s because they saw too much success and could never replicate it and flamed out or because they just saw it as an opportunity to hop on board and then go back to what they were doing—whatever it was. I personally just saw NFTs as a cool way to distribute work.

I appreciate and respect NFTs as a distribution model. I think I can say that I generally technically understand them. But they still boggle my mind, they were by far the biggest wrench thrown into my industry I’d ever experienced up to that point. AI is certainly beating it out now, but for most of my career, there was very little mass disruption at all. From the time I started in 2003 until NFTs became a ‘thing’ in 2021, there was never much mainstream attention on digital artists. Certainly there was in more niche pockets…but of course, all of a sudden, NFTs really took the world stage.

KC: How has your relationship to crypto evolved over time?

CA: I can comment on this in three ways: my own relationship to it, my thoughts about other artists and what advice I’d give, and then just thoughts in general.

I have a very restrained relationship with crypto. I never fully bought into it, nor do I hold much. When I’d make ETH from the sales of my work, I’d sell it. I saw it as my income, not as a speculative play. I only use and do things when I feel ready to. Obviously, it’s exciting when prices are higher, and there’s more activity. It’s kind of why I think apps like Zora and Rodeo are having a real moment. Even though it’s cheap collecting, people just want to go where there’s action. It’s pretty simple to me. People want to use the platforms where they have a chance to sell anything.

I do think everything may have happened too much, too fast. I saw some artists make a lot of money really quickly early on and then fade out. I think that’s really a mirror of the traditional art world. People burn out bright and then have to figure out how to regain relevance and spotlight. That’s a very hard reality. But it happens even quicker on the internet and even more so with NFTs, which is unfortunate. I think it’s all about expectations. If artists go into it thinking they’re going to get rich, they probably won’t. And if they go into it thinking they’re not going to sell anything, they might not—but they might. You just have to do it because you love it and it makes sense for the project you’re working on. That’s what it boils down to with anything. You have to let the money or success of a project come to you—and be mentally prepared for it not to. And if it doesn’t, be ready to make another thing and try again, like every artist in history has had to do.

KC: You mentioned AI earlier, what are your thoughts there?

CA: You know, AI is such a broad term, and it’s already affecting and touching everyone’s life. So I have to segment and separate the conversation—first and foremost, how it relates to me as an artist, how I incorporate it into my work, and understanding ethical boundaries around its use.

I don’t ever want to do anything that rips off someone else’s work or encroaches on their ideas. That’s always first and foremost for me. I don’t want to fundamentally change who I am, and I want everything I do to clearly have my creative DNA in it. I don’t want to reinvent myself just because a new tool has emerged. It’s ultimately about being super intentional.

I do believe AI is also a big reason a lot of artists I know have had slower years with commercial projects. It’s easier now for someone to crank out AI-generated work without hiring an artist. There’s no other way to say it. A junior designer can take a 90% AI-generated image, tweak it just enough, and get it over the finish line for an editorial piece. But that’s just the way the world is going. I can’t stop it or make anyone want to pay me instead of using AI. I understand that. It’s both good and bad. There are exciting uses for AI, and also some pretty horrifying ramifications when you look at the bigger picture. 

At the same time, you could ask, "Is Photoshop bad?" I could make all sorts of bad things with Photoshop. It comes down to all of us drawing our own lines and using tools in ways that feel right—ways that honor our work and who we are as artists. I think it’s just about equipping ourselves with independent, scrutinizing eyes, while still being open to trying new tools when they seem exciting or useful for creative work.

KC: One of the main criticisms I’ve heard about new technology in relation to art is that it trends towards making it harder for the individual to discern their own taste or craft. I imagine people even said that about early internet blogs like THE BRILLIANCE!. It’s hard to actually know what the impacts of these tools will be.

CA: I sit down with my daughter who is 7 and absolutely loves drawing. I’m watching her learn to shade, understand the basics of values, shadows, highlights, and mid-tones—all in real time. I want to do everything I can to help her develop a real, hands-on appreciation for drawing. 

I feel pretty confident in a prediction I have about her generation—post-Gen Z—growing up with a bit of a rejection of a lot of this technology. I’m sure things will first get even more digital in some ways, but I do think there’s going to be a whole generation that grows up with parents who have been so logged on all the time, so device-heavy, that hopefully, there will be a renewed appreciation for the arts and for the manual work that goes into it. Eventually, they’ll layer in all the amazing technology we have at our disposal. That’s my hope—that I can instill those principles and appreciation for traditional art early on, and then later they can learn the digital side. There’s never going to be any technology that takes away the joy of a blank sheet of computer paper and a crayon or pen for a kid. There’s something so pure about that. But at the same time, I’m open to taking a picture of it, running it through an AI tool, and seeing what happens when it turns into a video. These things can all exist together.

I think a lot about generations, ages, AI, art, and where we’re at right now. I’m thinking a lot about aging, growing up, and what it means to maintain relevance. What does that look like? What does it mean to claw for it versus aging gracefully in the digital age as an artist who’s followed the path I have?

A lot of that intersects with NFT culture—the quick hit, the flameout, and then suddenly you’re not part of anything outside of this very specific community. And then you’re left with the question: What are you? An NFT artist? I think that’s a very dangerous title. It’s an intriguing topic, especially with the pace of technology and AI. How can any human keep up with all of this? And what does it mean to have a long career in art while working digitally?

KC: What does it mean to you to age gracefully as an artist? Or to create “timeless art”? Or is that even a concept you subscribe to?

CA: When Midjourney V3 came out, there was a particular look and feel to almost all those outputs. And here we are, only about two years removed from that, and already, if you know what you’re looking at, you can immediately tell that an image was made in Discord.

Some artists captured that aesthetic and found ways to evolve it, but there’s still this demented, early nightmarish, inner-core-internet quality to those outputs that I think is fascinating. Whether that aesthetic is dated in a good or bad way is subjective, but it’s really interesting to me. The same goes for the way a lot of AI-generated art looks right now. If you just accept the first result and don’t refine it—don’t run it through more AI tools or add your own spin and layers—it locks into a certain look. You can pinpoint, "Oh, I know that was probably made in this era."

There are definitely eras of digital art that are aging poorly, mainly because the art wasn’t great to begin with. It was early experimentation with early tools. And I have plenty of that myself. But that’s true for every era and every medium.

I love this type of question, though—this type of exploration is pretty critical for any artist. Asking these questions, being aware of your time and place, recognizing what you’re making when you’re making it, and how it resonates (or doesn’t resonate) with viewers—all of that is worth considering when creating something.

Disclaimer:

This post is for general information purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any investment and should not be used in the evaluation of the merits of making any investment decision. It should not be relied upon for accounting, legal or tax advice or investment recommendations. You should consult your own advisers as to legal, business, tax, and other related matters concerning any investment or legal matters. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by Archetype. This post reflects the current opinions of the authors and is not made on behalf of Archetype or its affiliates and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Archetype, its affiliates or individuals associated with Archetype. The opinions reflected herein are subject to change without being updated.